iPhone® & iPad® Web Design For Dummies®

Making Your Site Search Engine Friendly

After you go to all the trouble to make your website work well on the iPhone and iPad, don’t forget to make it search engine friendly as well. Although many of the same rules of search engine optimization (SEO) apply, you need to understand a few key differences and special additions, as well as a few things you shouldn’t do on your mobile site, if you want to be included in mobile search engines, such as Google’s, shown in Figure 15-1.

Figure 15-1: Most major search engines offer mobile-optimized search options, but Google has one of the most advanced mobile search services.

Scoring high in search engine results is complicated because millions of sites vie for the top spots and search engines use complex formulas to determine which website should match any given keyword search. The formulas that search engines use to prioritize websites are guarded more carefully than Coca-Cola guards its recipe. And, if that doesn’t make it complicated enough, most search engines change their formulas regularly. (How regularly is also secret.)

The reason for all this secrecy is that the people who run sites such as Google and Bing want to deliver the best results when someone conducts a search — not just a list of the sites that reflect a smart web marketer’s ability to trick its way into the top position. Because a great deal of money can be made at the ...